In recent months, I have seen an unmistakable, growing wave of younger professionals choosing to invest their energy and creativity in the IBM i platform. This trend was particularly evident at the 2025 PowerUp conference.
Join your IT executive peers and host Alan Seiden for the next IT Leadership Summit—an exclusive event focused on exploring ways to leverage your IBM i investment, improve user satisfaction, and achieve greater professional success.
Organized with COMMON User Group in conjunction with POWERUp 2025, the Summit will take place May 19, 2025 at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Few seats remain, so contact Manzoor at COMMON soon if you would like to attend!
Carol Woodbury
I had the privilege of hosting security expert Carol Woodbury as she led a roundtable discussion at this past summer’s OCEAN TechCon. Carol is IBM i Security SME and Senior Advisor with our friends at Kisco Systems.
Many thanks to IBM and COMMON for their recent IT Leadership Summit on Security, held August 3, 2022, at IBM’s Astor Place offices in New York City.
This free, noncommercial event for IT executives featured speakers with broad experience addressing industry security concerns. Speakers included:
Heidi Schmidt draws on science to solve one of the biggest issues facing CIOs today—how to transfer knowledge of core business applications and processes to younger developers, while fostering new skills that lead to innovation.
At the CIO Summit in Dallas, March 23, 2020, Heidi will share her experience with collaborative learning and other techniques that aid generational change and find untapped potential within development teams.
Those of us who work with the newest technology on IBM i bristle at doom-laden predictions about the IBM i platform. Too many business and IT leaders unjustly associate the platform with old applications and stale business processes.
In Considering Leaving Legacy IBM Platforms? Beware, as Cost Savings May Disappoint, While Risking Quality, analysts Thomas Klinect and Mike Chuba of Gartner, Inc., warn against the tendency to make so-called legacy systems “a convenient scapegoat for corporate issues with technology.” Instead, they recommend a scientific approach to modernization without preconceived ideas.
Scott Forstie (left) with Alan Seiden at a previous CIO Summit
In recent years, Db2 for i Business Architect Scott Forstie and his team have rapidly strengthened the IBM i database, improving the sophistication of its SQL query engine, and adding to its galaxy of IBM i services. What’s more, they have several years’ worth of new enhancements in the pipeline.
CIOs and IT Directors can meet Scott at the CIO Summit on March 25, 2019, Charlotte, North Carolina, for an IBM i strategy briefing.
Steve Will discusses IBM i strategy
We recently hosted a day of strategy discussions for IT executives at Seiden Group’s CIO Summit in Dallas. Special guest Steve Will, Chief Architect of IBM i, joined the group to share his direction for the platform.
Salesforce’s cloud platform has become a leading choice for enterprises seeking to automate their sales process. Known primarily for customer relationship management (CRM), Salesforce also offers broad integration with functionality such as marketing automation. Salesforce can also be integrated with core systems, such as those running on IBM i.
Here are a couple of suggestions from Seiden Group’s IBM i and cloud integration specialists.
In late April in Manhattan, Seiden Group had the pleasure of hosting its first IBM i CIO Summit.
Now we’ve gone a step further, teaming up with System i Developer partners Susan Gantner, Jon Paris and Paul Tuohy, to organize an IBM i CIO Summit “Plus.” The event will be held October 16-17, 2017, in Minneapolis, in conjunction with the RPG & DB2 Summit.